Jeff and Joel are joined today by Chris "Moot" Poole, founder of 4chan and Canv.as. It's a wide ranging discussion from internet memes and tropes to the danger of the SOPA bill that is currently making it's way through the house.

We
need a number display like they have in delis. If anyone out there can
get us one on the cheap, Joel would appreciate it so he can always know
what podcast number we're on.

Canvas is re-imagining a message
board, because the aesthetic of forums hasn't changed in a very long
time. It's got a focus on remixing and collaborating images.

It's
similar to 4chan but interestingly, Canvas requires users to
authenticate their login using Facebook to deter trolls, but still
allows pseudonymous and anonymous posting.

4chan is weird. Stuff
doesn't last very long there - there's no archive. Moot gives us a
brief history of 4chan and how and why he started it.

Its a fast
way to get a message out to thousands of people because every post
starts out as position zero on page zero. That's why 4chan has a
reputation for "porniness" when that actually represents a small
percentage of the content that ends up there. (See the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory.)

Most
of the internet's memes originate on 4chan. They make the internet! The
memes migrate to Reddit, where they move to the greater internet as a
whole.

So! Canvas! It's a real venture-backed company.
It's not going to serve display ads (unlike 4chan which has only been
monetized by banner ads).

Shifting gears to talk about
SOPA/PROTECT-IP. Hollywood wants it, and they spend way more money on
campaign financing than the tech industry, so legislators are going to
pass it. Hollywood wants the ability to go after ISPs who are resolving
DNS entries to overseas sites, which is stupid because the workaround
for that policy is simple. It wreaks havoc on the existing DMCA
provisions for protecting copyrighted content online.

A long,
long time ago... people tried to sue telephone companies for allowing
calls in which illegal things were discussed. That was ridiculous, and
the phone companies were ruled to have no liability for how their
channel is used. That's the precedent that the internet operates on
today.

Joel describes the current provisions outlined in the
DMCA that give copyright holders and websites ways to enforce copyright
in a fair way that punishes only the infringer, not the website.

It's
demonstrative of the fact that Congress is run by corporations
currently; the only things that gets passed are things that companies
want passed. Example: pizza is a vegetable.

Go to americancensorship.org to
learn all about SOPA/PROTECT-IP, and what you should do to get
involved. (Hint: in the U.S., it involves contacting your
representatives.) It's likely to come to a full floor vote soon, and we
need to stop it. Add your name to the list Senator Ron Wyden will read during his filibuster of the bill.

We
come back to 4chan, where we learn about moderators, janitors, and
on-topic-ness rules on the various boards. People apply to be moderators
on 4chan, so it's self-selecting.